Football Outsiders Almanac bullish on the Texans

Recently, the 2013 Football Outsiders Almanac was released and contains the most optimistic prediction about the Texans in their team history. Using their proprietary projection data, they give the Texans a 32 percent chance of being a “Super Bowl Contender,” meaning 11+ wins this season.

I only buy one football publication every year, and Football Outsiders Almanac is it.

The author of the Houston Texans chapter of the FOA 2013 is Tom Gower (@ThomasGower on Twitter). In full disclosure, he is a Titans fan but you wouldn’t know that by reading the Texans chapter of the book. I asked him a some questions specific to the chapter, but really you are missing out if you don’t read the whole book. I’ve started the PDF, and am waiting for my hard copy to arrive.

Here’s our Q&A:

The 2013 Football Outsiders Almanac has the most favorable prediction for the Texans in its team history. What are the main reasons for that and how do those predictions compare to the rest of the AFC South and the league as a whole?

“We project the Texans with 9.3 wins. That’s the ninth-best total in the league. The Texans have been a reasonably good team the past couple seasons-not just 2012 and 2011, but also 2009 and our numbers indicate they were a little unfortunate to go 6-10 in 2010 as well. Establishing a consistent level of success tends to result in a better team projection.

That 9.3 wins puts the Texans on top of the AFC South by a comfortable margin. We project the second-place Colts to have 7.6 wins, and that total is actually closer to last place Jacksonville’s than it is to Houston’s.”

What are 3 reasons for optimism and 3 reasons for pessimism for Texans fans?

“Optimism:

1. There’s a long history of teams that suddenly improve for a season on defense, then get worse. The 2011 Jaguars were up there with the 2011 Texans as one of the biggest one-year defensive turnarounds in history. The Jaguars regressed in 2012. The Texans improved. Defense tends to be more inconsistent from year to year than offense, but our numbers indicate the Texans should have a good defense again.

2. What’s most important to Texans fans now is winning the Super Bowl. You can’t win the Super Bowl without making the playoffs. We have the Texans as clear favorites in the AFC South and with a 67% chance of making the playoffs.

3. The Texans won’t be the best team in the league, but the team that wins the Super Bowl is the team that wins consecutive games in January and February, not the best team in the league. The Ravens last year finished 8th by DVOA. The Giants in 2011 finished 12th. The last #1 team in DVOA to win the Super Bowl was the 2002 Buccaneers.

Pessimism:

1. Andre Johnson is 32 and played in 20 of 32 games in 2010 and 2011. Owen Daniels’ YAC+ is on a steady decline from +1.7 to +1.2 to +0.5 the past three seasons, and the Patriots kept running him down in the playoff game. No wide receiver other than Johnson has more than 10 career catches. Playmaker Score, our wide receiver projection system, is moderately positive on DeAndre Hopkins, but the Texans need him to be a major contributor immediately.

2. The Texans were a right-handed running team for the whole of the Gary Kubiak era, until last year. They switched to a left-handed running team in 2012 because of offensive line struggles, and that affected things like the play-action game in complicated ways. Short version: they were below league-average when it came to efficiency on play-action last year. You can be reasonably bullish about Brandon Brooks, but right tackle is still a major question mark.

3. Defensive back could be an issue. Brice McCain was great in 2011, but wasn’t nearly as effective in 2012 before he was injured. Brandon Harris was burned bad often in his limited sample size. Glover Quin was a pretty good cover man for a safety, which means Danieal Manning and D.J. Swearinger have big shoes to fill. Ed Reed also missed a ton of tackles last year, not an ideal trait in a deep safety.”

In the 2013 FOA, you noted that Matt Schaub was not good against the big blitz (6 or more rushers) but did not face it that much. In the 2010 FOA, the QB strategic tendency was “Do not big blitz Matt Schaub.” Is this a tendency that tends to be consistent from year to year with quarterbacks? Is it likely a Matt Schaub thing or a personnel thing or both?

“Big blitzing is small sample size theater, especially since the Texans faced the fewest in the league last year. I’d say one of the problems the Texans had last year against the big blitz was Andre Johnson was their only gamebreaker at receiver, so even if Schaub got a pass offense they couldn’t necessarily punish teams enough.”

Just observationally, it seems that the Texans offense has become more conservative now that more often than not, they have NFL quality defensive play not requiring them to play so much from behind. Do the numbers tend to support that? (I’m thinking of the use of 3.4 WR sets, although that might be a function of not being solid at 3-5 WR spot).

“Back in 2010, when the defense was awful, the Texans used 3 or more wide receivers 43% of the time. That was a below average mark and has dropped to roughly 25% each of the past two seasons.

The most common personnel grouping for almost every team last year was “11” (one back, one tight end, three wide receivers). The Texans were one of the teams for which that was not true. Counting James Casey as a tight end, they lined up in “12” (one back, two tight ends, two wide receivers) 61% of the time and were only in “11” 21% of the time. This is as conservative a personnel grouping as you see in the league.

The Texans were right to play such a conservative personnel grouping so often, as they’ve struggled badly the past couple seasons when they’ve played “11.” In 2012, their DVOA in “12” was 14.9%, compared to -27.5% in “11.” In 2011, when they had Jacoby Jones and thus better WR depth (at least in the games Andre Johnson played), they had a 17.6% DVOA in “12” and -7.3% DVOA in “11.” DVOA includes an adjustment for game situation, so this suggests the Texans offense simply hasn’t worked as well when they’ve played with more wide receivers. This could reflect the quality of the wide receiver depth, the particular strengths of the offense, or a number of things it’s hard to tease out.”

“I’m still expecting double-digit sacks. He did not have a particularly disproportionate number of sacks to hurries, and while the Colts, Jaguars, and Titans all made major investments on the right side of the offensive line, he still had plenty of sacks against the rest of the league.

My FO colleague (and Texans fan) Rivers McCown wrote a column recently on tipped passes, in which he noted only two players in the past five years combined tipped more passes than the 17 Watt tipped last year. Unless he really is significantly better at tipping passes than any other defensive player in the league, he’s not coming close to that total again.

(Steph note: Will note that in practice even from his rookie year he seemed to be unusually skilled in tipping passes. In the Wednesday morning practice, even when he didn’t tip the pass in 11-on-11, he often used his jump and raised arms to block a passing lane at a key moment, causing the quarterback to get timing off route or not throw. That last thing isn’t a stat but certainly can cause frustration in the offensive timing. So just observationally, I do think that Watt is better at tipped passes than rest of the league, but 17 passes tipped is an insane number for a defensive lineman to match).

I’m very, very curious to see what opposing offenses to do gameplan against Watt’s backside penetration that shut down so many run plays last year. He seemed to just miss a number against the tackles in the playoffs, and I believe it was because the Patriots were having their backs take a wider path to the hole to make it harder for Watt to make the play.”

What does FOA have to say about the Texans projected strength of schedule?

“Party time! Even with a first-place schedule and games against our top teams in the AFC, the Patriots and Broncos, the Texans have the league’s third-easiest schedule.”

And about that Texans special teams?

“It probably comes as no surprise the Texans had the league’s worst special teams last year. Shayne Graham was awful on field goals and on kickoffs, and the Texans also struggled returning kicks. Some college kickers, like Justin Tucker for the Ravens last year, transition to the league well, while others struggle. Randy Bullock is a big question mark, but if he can produce touchbacks and be just average on field goals, the Texans should be a lot better. I don’t think Keshawn Martin will be a great kickoff return man, but his numbers suggest he could be mediocre, and a full season of mediocre kickoff returns would have been an upgrade. I also wouldn’t get too excited about Shane Lechler. After years of ranking at the top of our gross value measure (i.e., excluding returns), he was below average last year and actually worse than Donnie Jones. That could just be a one-year fluke, but it could also be the start of age-related decline from a player who turns 37 in August.”

Please thank Tom for his observations.

I’d like to thank Tom for answering these questions, and for those on Twitter suggest following him @Thomas Gower. (If you are a NFL fan that is not on Twitter, you should very much consider doing so. It is great for breaking news, and often gives you information that may not be worth an entire blog post but is good to know. You don’t have to say anything on it if you don’t feel comfortable in doing so, but it is great as sort of a newsreader if you follow good accounts. Check out some of the folks I follow if you want some ideas of good sports people to follow. It also can make watching games better…often you can find out injury status reports faster on Twitter than TV and radio. Oh, and you can follow me @StephStradley).

What I like about what FOA does is put individual teams in the context of the entire league. It is easy for fanbases to focuses on their particular strengths and weaknesses and not see how those things are relative to other teams. They chart games so that they can show tendencies of different teams, and the numbers put performance in context.

And it is dispassionate and not opinion-based. The numbers say what the numbers say.

In Wednesday’s practice, I asked Gary Kubiak about some of the disappointing 3rd down percentage numbers from last year, and he acknowledged it was something that they were working on in camp as it related to “situational football:”

“Yeah, the game is played situational all of the time. So you’re trying to remind them of situations. You don’t just practice to practice. Why are we doing this? What’s the situation? We were a pretty good third-down team for a good portion of the year on both sides of the ball. Again, at the end, it wasn’t as good. I think, offensively, the thing that surprised me is we weren’t a good third-and-short team and, the way we run the ball, we should really be good. That was probably what we did the poorest and then, defensively, when you’ve got somebody third-and-15-plus, you should get off the field and I think we gave up three touchdowns of 70-plus yards on third-and-15. So a couple of glaring things going on there with our team that we have to address.”

Often the numbers you see from Football Outsiders make these sorts of statistics pop out as the season is progressing.